


Lullaby Of A Deserted Hell

by MiChiAzalie



Series: Elegy For A Nameless Flower [3]
Category: Fate/EXTRA, Fate/Grand Order, Fate/stay night & Related Fandoms
Genre: Angst, F/F, F/M, I'm so sorry, Loss, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-16
Updated: 2021-03-16
Packaged: 2021-03-25 07:34:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,851
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30085647
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MiChiAzalie/pseuds/MiChiAzalie
Summary: No matter how terrible a man Ereshkigal knew him to be, she had seen, on many occasions ever since he took her from her, how Gilgamesh had been looking at Hakuno, and how Hakuno had stared at him in return, and now that she was gone, surrendered to the currents of time, Ereshkigal tries to remember her before the king stole her love and her eyes all for himself. While she is not Rin -not yet-, she copes with the grief of loss in measures, in the only way a being like her could, clinging to someone who isn’t there anymore, even if the the king had held her attention in a way she never would.
Relationships: Ereshkigal | Lancer & Kishinami Hakuno, Gilgamesh | Caster/Kishinami Hakuno, Gilgamesh/Kishinami Hakuno, Kishinami Hakuno/Tohsaka Rin
Series: Elegy For A Nameless Flower [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2026984
Comments: 12
Kudos: 14





	Lullaby Of A Deserted Hell

**Author's Note:**

> This was supposed to be something else, but turns out my serotonin machine broke this week and so here I am, bringing you instead another piece of crippling depression, now starring two of my favorite best girls and everyone's favorite Mesopotamic asshole.  
> Title also blatantly taken from [this song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r2XUaEptoR4)

Once upon a time, in some undetermined timeline far beyond her current reach, her empty eyes were filled with color.

However, once upon a time, she hadn’t been ‘herself’.

Once upon a time, in a distant future, Ereshkigal had been -will be?- a dauntless girl with pretty eyes the color of sapphire instead of her current dull gold-red.

She would be a normal human, with hopes and dreams.

She is none of that right now. Where she stands, seated in her pedestal amongst all-knowing deities, there are no hopes or dreams anymore, and in fact, it's been so long since she had deposited her earnest expectations on something, she can hardly remember what 'hope' feels like.

Her eyes are cold and empty now, like husks. They are nothing like the eyes of the girl she stole her current body from.

…That girl’s eyes had been pretty before they were usurped by Ereshkigal herself and turned into inhuman, all-encompassing scarlet. Maybe they still were. That girl had a friend who always said her eyes were pretty, but if Ereshkigal indulges in the vaporous memories that she retains of her vessel, she knows she would only be indulging in a lie.

However, that had not stopped her before, had it?

Ereshkigal had been lonely, and she had been selfish. Like such a weakling desperate to have something to hold on to, she clung to her vessel’s hope and the lingering memory of a woman’s love that was never meant to be hers to keep.

Though she had long since accustomed herself to the howling, bitter cold of her home, to lose herself to the weight of thousands upon thousands of howling, caged souls because that was who she was and that was and would be her duty for all eternity, she still liked to dream of warmth and fields of spring flowers. Just like humans were desperate to live, she was desperate for warmth, and on one night, when she found herself tormented by that very same thing that she had once claimed to be used to—the bitter chill of her home, the weight of her duty—, she went to shout to the skies and demand reparations from the only being she could only hope she could turn to.

" _Have I not been a loyal daughter to you_?" Ereshkigal shouted out her question to the sky of black above, on a night when the moon shone the brightest. " _Have I not exalted you high enough? Why, why do you feel the need to spite me so? What qualities does my sister possess that she would always come first? A reprieve from this bitterness and coldness and darkness is all I ask!_ "

And then, with mild surprise, she felt a soft caress on her skin—odd though not unheard of even if coming from the harsh, stern touch of the man who created her.

Soon she was looking into his red, glassy eyes, a small, cruel smile on his lips.

Ereshkigal had stilled and straightened, back then, in the same way her vessel would do when in front of her stern parent.

At her silence, the deity tutted.

“… _So you desire something of me, beloved daughter of mine, enough that you would shout it to the skies in hopes it reaches me from where I stand; so why remain quiet in my presence now, when I have come to your aid, to listen to your plight?_ ” but she only narrowed her eyes, skeptical even of her own kin. Nanna could be the deity of the ever-tranquil moon, but he never gave unless to his most cherished daughter. Otherwise, he always took, took and took as all deities did, but if this was a pretext for a test, then Ereshkigal would prevail. She would prove to him that she was also worthy of his respect; she will pass whatever trial she was being put through now. “ _Whyever the hesitation?_ ”

And on that very same night, he promised her, ‘ _as_ _it is I who knows where your allegiances lie to, and for such quality faithfulness, it shall be I who shall quench this ever-growing need that shines brightest in your soul.’_

 _A companion to tie your soul to,_ he had told her. _One for your heart to flee to when the echoes of the never-ending song of sinners trapped for eternity becomes too much for your soul to bear._

Hakuno had been her father’s most thoughtful gift up to date.

 _Aren’t the doll’s eyes round and pretty? Isn't the doll's curly hair soft? Don’t you like the doll’s dress?_ It was truly all that the girl was meant to be; just a pretty new plaything to appease an unsatisfied daughter. …But the doll was actually her most favorite present. It made her vessel’s heart clench erratically to an unnamed emotion, and when Ereshkigal locked eyes with those of smoldering honey for the first time, she felt — _recognition_. Like being embraced by water.

The doll simile might not have been wrong in the slightest. The girl before her was a husk of herself. She could barely be called human.

She was… an empty vessel, all fragments and all at odds, her eyes glassy and distracted, unable to focus on anything much.

An empty shell, irresponsive to everything, even to the feel of threat.

The first thought that had crossed her mind, back then when she was brought to her, was that the girl appeared as if she had been born but two days ago. Thankfully, her features were nondescript enough that she would not stand out if she were to be left to mingle with the rest of the populace.

Hakuno -her vessel provided her with the knowledge, and even if she knew that wasn’t supposed to be her real name yet, even if she knew she shouldn’t indulge too much on her vessel’s memories nor her sentiments in case they proved… compromising, it gave Ereshkigal something to call her by until the point she either could tell her how she was called now or she herself could come up with a new name entirely- knew not where she was. As such, the only one person who could introduce her to this new world was but she herself.

Hakuno —or Nungal, as Ereshkigal herself decided to baptize her when she decided her real was too suspicious to be uttered in public- spoke not a single drop of Sumerian and could understand nothing of what Ereshkigal was trying to tell her, and therein that she knew not how to speak the language, she knew not how to write, either. She was an infant trapped in the body of an adult.

—No, more than that, Hakuno was an adult’s toy.

At least, Ereshkigal had to think wryly, the girl liked her new provisional name well enough; a nondescript name to match her nondescript new friend as they navigated through this new unknown together, from reluctant cooperation, to amicable convivence and finally to tentative friendship all over again. She had even repeated her new name a few times aloud, testing it in her tongue, the name even having an even better ring to it as she said it with her quirky accent-

The rest of it had been a whole ordeal; as she started to regain pieces of herself, Hakuno had turned to be mistrustful of her. Ereshkigal hadn’t liked that she had been, even if she had been right to be—after all, Hakuno had been plucked from the rivulets of time, a deity stole her from another deity keeping her asleep and abandoned like a toy gathering dust for the right time to be used only so that that the sentiments of loneliness and neglect of yet another deity could be appeased.

Thus, from the very beginning, Hakuno began her life on the wrong foot, as a puppet on a string.

But in the end, she warmed up to her faster and harder than she would have liked to, partly because of her vessel’s already stablished sentiments for the woman, and partly because of Ereshkigal’s own—because true to her father’s words, and true to her anguished demand for tribute, all that Ereshkigal wanted was a friend with whom to share this crippling weight that was loneliness, so that her mind didn’t have to collapse alone under the echoing melody of the souls in the deepest depths of earth.

When Hakuno finally learned enough words to form compelling, coherent sentences, the woman, in her own broken version of Sumerian, had asked her casually, "Have we ever met before?" tilting her head as she looked at her with honest eyes like she wasn’t laying on the chambers of the goddess of the underworld herself, but as if she was making idle conversation with a beloved friend that she hasn’t seen in ages.

They had been on the bed, holding hands like two people reunited at last would be, so the simile wasn’t quite so flawed. Ereshkigal couldn’t blame her for it, and she couldn’t say she was offended by it, either. She knew Hakuno was asking this in honest curiosity, and since the way Ereshkigal sometimes referred to her could lead to believe exactly that, Hakuno couldn’t be blamed for her boldness—and she was, actually, only partially right to make such an assumption.

Ereshkigal had known her once, though not being as ‘herself’, but as another woman entirely.

In another woman’s shoes, she would come to be her friend.

She reached out, wrapping her arms around Hakuno to hold her, feeling the softness of her hair and the warmth of her skin. She can smell dust and dead flowers.

"Perhaps we have," she had mysteriously stated, giving her a measured look as they laid there. "In my future, and in your past."

Hakuno only looked at her confused, but she prodded no further than that, touching her cheek as her fingers brushed her skin with care instead of fear or contempt, and even smiling a little in return, but the crease in her temples didn’t quite subside and Ereshkigal couldn’t be sure of why. Perhaps, instead, Hakuno was too busy over-thinking the whole thing inside her head. She had always been prone to do that, after all, and there was no reason to think that this Hakuno wouldn’t have this particular trait as well, if they would end up being one and the same, in the future.

“Do you really always have to speak to me so formally?” she had asked. Her fingertips caught a delicate curl of her hair. “Don't you think it's a little bit… silly, speaking in riddles when we’re like this?”

In her new temple robes, with her long hair spreading like a blanket of unseen starlight, Hakuno looked more inviting than her vessel remembered her ever being, and then, as the goddess absentmindedly looked at her face, she realized that what her vessel meant was that the girl, Hakuno, was _beautiful_ ; it wasn’t the structure of her face. While other maidens would apply kohl to their eyes or wax on their lips to make them fuller and more inviting, Hakuno scarcely wore any makeup, and though her lips were faint red in color, that was the unintentional result of Hakuno chewing them too much in restless concern.

It was not because of any of those vain things.

What made Hakuno attractive was the fact that she was _alive,_ her brown eyes a kaleidoscope of emotions, a lake that looks smooth on the surface and deceptively draws people in only to suck them in with hidden currents until they drowned under the tides, and Ereshkigal leaned in and kissed the corner of her mouth before she could stop to think about what she was doing, eliciting a soft, helpless noise at the back of the brunette's throat when the goddess moved her hand to trace it over the rise of her hip.

She acted on instinct, hands and body moving faster than her own conscious thoughts, that unnamed feeling again pumping her veins with liquid flame, and it shocked her as much as it knocked Hakuno’s breath away, amber eyes sparkling with smoldering intensity, and she fixed her body to hers instead of forcing her away from it, bringing her in to brush her lips to hers and forward into startling intimacy, awkward with an innocence the goddess thought was too beyond her reach to ever experience again. Though the contact was tentative, Ereshkigal still drowned, drowned and drowned in it, hugging her against her chest and not letting go. She almost even forgot that Hakuno was an entity of her own, with how much a part of her she felt.

Ereshkigal knew of what befell the king’s one and only friend, so she was careful of keeping Hakuno away both from prying eyes and even more prying hands, fearful of the day that the woman would meet a similar fate, her mind already making a mental list of the names of the people she would rather prefer they never found about Hakuno’s existence at all—though in the end, as she ruminated about it, not many actually came to mind and, in fact, what she once believed would be a long list of people to avoid entirely to keep Hakuno safe in her embrace actually only ended up comprising two names; her own sister’s and that of the king of Uruk himself.

However, the underworld was indeed lonely, and a human just like her couldn’t survive long in the darkness of oblivion, so she presented her to the world above even when she was not very enthused about handing her to a priest, inevitable though it was considering it was a required rite of passage to become a temple maiden, even when she knew the world would only be unfairly cruel to her in return, because Ereshkigal was fairly familiarized with how women were treated, required to stand as mere decoration but never to be heard at all, if ever; ancient Sumer is no better than her lonely home of caged souls, or Rin’s bleak, stagnant future.

And that, she found out soon enough, had been her first mistake.

On that night, Hakuno hadn’t been meant to join in with the rest of the temple maidens that would soon surround the king in an endless parade of frivolity and flesh, skin blending together beneath his, all shining with sweat—Gilgamesh, who would no doubt be seated in his throne like some sort of God himself, actually no better than the ones he so despises, the center of attention, desired by _all_ in a haze of indiscriminate pleasure, amidst devotees and soon-to-be-toys that he would soon discard for newer, shinier ones, a smile on his lips that would be smug and selfish and predatory, one that only someone in full knowledge that he owned Uruk and everything in it would dare to make.

But the woman joined them, anyway, and predictably, the king took her away from her temple and from her arms with a ridiculous excuse, storming and desecrating her very own home and place of cult, only to disappear with her maiden into the night as if she were his to covet and his to keep.

Ereshkigal remembers that day with accuracy, remembers wanting to go to back and scream until the very foundations of the underworld cracked and broke apart all around her, perhaps even find whose idea it was to bring the only woman who hadn’t been yet instructed to lead a life on the temples to the king who knows not of the meaning of restraint, who not many years ago had had no qualms in taking the warmth of all of Uruk’s women for himself. She thought it would make her feel better about the whole thing, and though she ended up finding the maidens who sneaked her inside the palace and threw them into the river for their act of disrespect, in the end none of her efforts to make herself feel better helped at all; there was nothing that could be done to keep her hands from slowly curling into fists, nails digging into the soft flesh of her palms until they bled.

What right did Gilgamesh think he had, to take from her in such a manner? She found her first, _they_ found her first, so why? What did Gilgamesh do to deserve her affections? She was more dedicated than he would ever be, _saner_ than he undoubtedly was. Gilgamesh was, Gilgamesh was just—

But despite all of that, Ereshkigal knew the truth with a white-hot certainty.

No matter how terrible a man Ereshkigal knew him to be, she had seen, on many occasions ever since, how Gilgamesh had been looking at her maiden, and how Hakuno had stared at him in return, and she was well aware, no matter how much it burnt her chest, that the amount of time the king spent with Hakuno, the amount of time he spent studying her, went well beyond what could be considered as curiosity or even the kind of garden-variety carnal attraction he would get tired of like he always did. Gilgamesh was already in neck deep, just as much as Rin and herself were; he had reached the realm of other, more troublesome things, whether he chose to acknowledge it or not for the time being, and there was simply nothing that Ereshkigal could do about it, other than simply watch the events unfold as a reluctant bystander.

The king held Hakuno’s attention in a way she never would, and it was in that moment of clarity that she had to wonder why love, of all things, was revered as some kind of forgiving and selfless thing, when it was clearly the cruelest thing of all. It’s little wonder, then, why her sister was the one to hold reign over such an emotion, if it’s such a thick and oppressive and heavy thing.

There was simply no point in trying to find logic in something the very essence of which was illogical to begin with, and it took all of a few moments to realize that this is how it was always meant to be. Rin saw it happen to her with a different version of Gilgamesh, so it was only fitting for her to suffer through the same thing as well—Hell is nothing but repetition, and as its ruler, she knows this better than anyone else.

Seeing her with him _hurt_ , hurt to the point she thought of herself to be sick, but there was nothing to be done about it, so she strived to strangle every bloom, choke every of her vessel’s thoughts to silence so that she could go back to how she was before she was made soft by loving Hakuno more than was perhaps healthy for either of them -her vessel and herself-, and enclose her own heart in an ice that will never thaw.

And now…

Well.

In the end, Ishtar did end up finding about Hakuno, despite her best efforts to keep her concealed and despite the king’s own barriers all around the front gates of the palace. Worse still, and also despite of her many warnings to the king himself, her sister also ended up finding out about the babe Hakuno had held in her arms, a boy with honey blond hair and gold-brown eyes, who cuddled close to his mother’s bosom when she first introduced him to the goddess of the underworld and looked at her with curious eyes.

And… Ereshkigal might not be Rin -not yet-, but still, she copes with her own grief in measures, in the only way a being like her could, clinging to someone who isn’t there anymore, trying to remember her touch even if it was never meant to be hers.

She tries to remember how her touch felt, the way her hands stroke her cheeks, the way she cupped her face in them. She tries to remember the warmth of her skin and the scent of wildflowers that could only belong to her, when they had been together, before the king stole her love and her eyes -the color of a wheat field in a summer morning, grand and peaceful- all for himself.

She tries to cope, and she keeps drowning.

Hakuno, who remained dauntless even when worst came to worst. Hakuno, who assured her she’d always remain by her side, even if the whole world became her enemy.

Hakuno, who left her—and who left them.

She knows that the woman known as Hakuno Kishinami was far from being ‘dead’. ‘Death’ for Hakuno Kishinami was but a temporary state of being, she’d known even before she found no trace of her song in the deepest depth of her lonely hell, and she knows because she will meet her, in her future. Hakuno simply returned to the nothingness where she came from, and it really wasn’t so bad, was it? That girl has always been a pawn in other people's games, she’s always been meant to be just another piece in a game, designed to be reset over and over again after one game was over and another started anew.

After all, Hell was but repetition. She was brought to a Hell, only to be thrown into another.

And it should be okay, the goddess thinks, though she knows it isn’t. In a way, it’s fitting.

Thankfully, she doesn’t have to think too much on it. Before she can lose herself to her most unsavory memories, a faint melody reaches her perceptive ears.

She closes her eyes.

In the distance, the overpowering feeling of someone’s soul echoes from every corner in her empty realm, broken and distorted. _Ah,_ she thinks, _yet another departed soul for me to keep,_ and she readies herself to welcome this new addition into the lonely coldness of her home.

" _Come to me_ , _weary traveler_ ," she says in a soft whisper. " _Come forward to eternal slumber and guide yourself to m…”_ but something feels fundamentally _odd_ about this soul -it’s too warm, much too cloying, much too _intense,_ like a blazing sun _-_ , and it finally dawns on her. “…Oh, hell,” she drawls unpleasantly. “…It's you again, isn't it?"

When she opens her eyes, Ereshkigal is not met with the warmth of a soul that has departed from the world of the living as she had been expecting, but instead, what she sees is the border of life and death opened wide before her, appearing as a black crack in the fabric of reality, ripping the world apart, and peeking from beyond said border, Ur-Nungal, the only prince of Uruk, smiles at her.

It’s a little bit…disturbing to look at. He would have scared the living daylights out of a human, she is sure of it: because he is only peeking halfway through the border, only the upper part of his torso can be seen as he floats, suspended in the air. The rest of his body remains obscured, hidden beyond the other side of the barrier, and like this, it looks as though someone has cut off the other half of his body.

She is sure Ur-Nungal makes himself appear like this on purpose only for the sake of dramatism. Half-breeds such as him sure like their dramatic entrances.

“Ah, fancy seeing you on duty again, Ereshkigal.” The boy tilts his head as he offers her a sybaritic smirk, earrings clinking to an unheard melody. “Missed me?”

She sighs.

"Spare me your nonsense, Ur," she snaps back. "What are you doing here now, anyway? And don't tell me that this time you're actually _dying_ —you're about to meddle with my duties again, aren't you?"

If it could be possible, the young man’s smile widens, looking so delighted with himself that she can’t help but think that it’s really frankly disgusting, how much everything of him reminds her of _somebody else_ and at the same time it doesn't.

"So it would seem."

Ereshkigal lets a string of colorful curses escape her lips, finding out much to her own surprise that her insults were becoming more and more inspired each time Ur-Nungal misused his abilities for his personal benefit—which happened quite a lot, actually, since king Gilgamesh, now alone in his efforts at both commanding a kingdom and nurturing a warlord disguised as a boy only sixteen years of age, seemed unable to stop him from being a little shit for at least five consecutive minutes.

She should have expected Gilgamesh’s only begotten son to be as arrogant and reckless as he was. However, she also supposes that the very varied assortment of cruel, fickle Gods who have trampled over his life -herself amongst them- have helped in nurturing him to be like this, so the boy, who stares back at her with the kind of look that says he knows more things than he allows himself to show others, a glint of cunning in his startlingly and achingly familiar amber eyes, is only partially at fault for his own self-destructive impulses.

She takes a deep breath of her own, “You— _you_ ,” and explodes. “I _can’t_ believe any of _you_. You’re just like your father; you just _love_ to make my life complicated only because I don’t enable you. Listen, whatever it is you’re trying to do, you really must put a stop to it before _he_ notices you missing _again_ , comes here to my place personally to beat you up with a worn-out shoe, and I end up having to take care of two persistent headaches instead of just one. I'm in enough trouble as it is. You know Ishtar has been after you since the moment you opened your eyes to the world; I’m doing you no favors if I keep indulging you in your caprices.”

"Ah, but I'm afraid I must, _Eresh_ ,” he says casually, even having the nerve to shorten her name just the way she hates the most. “As you surely must know by now already, I must satisfy my curiosity and all that. As the prince of Uruk, it is my birthright."

"Of course it is," she replies sulkily, and then, “does the king _actually_ know of what you do when he’s not keeping a watchful eye on you?”

Ur-Nungal waves a careless hand at her in lieu of an answer. _So that’s a no,_ she thinks.

“If he can’t figure this one out for himself, then he doesn’t deserve to know, don’t you believe?” Is his careless addition to her question, thus proving her suspicions right.

Figures. She thinks it’s a little bit funny, in a sort of warped way, that the only one person to manage to put the Wise King of Uruk’s intellect to shame would be none other than the blood of his own blood.

“Ur-Nungal.” She readies herself, swallowing the bitter twist in her throat before continuing, “You know my answer remains always the same every time you drop yourself by the underworld, so why do you keep bothering?”

In this brief moment of silence that ensues as the young man thinks of a befitting answer, Ereshkigal supposes she should be happy that things turned the way they did, in the end.

In his avariciousness, the king took something precious and irreplaceable from her, cruelly snatching away what undoubtedly was her one and only cherished friend, only so that he could covet her and keep her to himself alone.

The prince looks at her as he raises his chin defiantly, “she isn’t dead. That is why.”

And in return she gives him a look that is wistful and sad in equal measures.

“You don’t know that.”

But she knows.

Ur-Nungal lets a dry huff, but then he draws in a deep breath, as if he, all of a sudden, has become unsure of what he meant to say. However, his expression betrays nothing outside the realm of affected serenity when he finally confesses, “…I need not to know. I told myself, all those years ago, that I wouldn’t know for sure unless I found her. The fact you don’t keep custody of her soul is all the proof I need to keep moving forward.”

Reflected in his eyes, Ereshkigal can see the familiar flame of a fire she though she’d never see again. Though buried underneath a deluge of pained emotions accumulated over the years, it's still there, a sparkling, solitary bit of light underneath the hurt, impossible to stifle as he clings to the reminder that once they had been whole.

The light called ‘hope’, dancing across his irises like a kaleidoscope as he debates between the softness of his youth and the stern authority of his soon-to-be inherited position.

At her silence, he continues.

“…It’s none of my concern that you or the likes of my father have given up on that. If you won’t, I shall just keep on moving until the moon itself can speak right through me. ...And besides," he says as an afterthought, "with how deserted this place of yours always looks like, at least I am _so kind_ to give you something to occupy your mind with, don't you think?”

And in return, she realizes, the king has given her someone just as equally precious.

Love might be the cruelest thing of all, but it was also very beautiful.

Ereshkigal lets out a weary sigh, equal parts exasperation and desolation.

The feel of Ur-Nungal’s soul has always been strong and bright like a blazing sun, but carefree and warm as the summer breeze, so overpowering Ereshkigal could even hear his soul's song clear across the boundary between their worlds, louder even than that of Gilgamesh’s, as it now wanders and hesitates and reminds her of the inevitable moment that she will have to come claim his soul as well—if something else doesn’t beat her to it again, that is.

But now the notes in his song are out of tune, and the more he tampers with the boundaries of fate, the more at odds his melody becomes, the more he breaks. It does not escape her knowledge that, for a scant moment, she’s mistaken his soul song for that of someone deceased, and she’s now unsure how much longer it can stay dormant within him.

She knows from bitter experience that once he reaches the tipping point, no one will be able to bring him back.

“…You’re just like her,” she says -again-, voice broken with realization and a slight pang of sadness, taking careful steps to him before reaching up to cup the prince’s cheeks in her cold hands. "I wish you weren't the same, but you are."

His eyes stare at hers in confusion as she holds his face in her hands, a familiar little frown marring his expression, one that she’s seen many times before in someone else’s face and that makes her heart ache and her stomach clench, all at once.

Hope was what fueled Hakuno’s body, what kept her from not giving up, what kept her moving forward even when she was hurt badly and had to face insurmountable obstacles, even when everything seemed to lead her to a dead end, even as misery rained on her in a never-ending stream, trapped in a world that worked like a loaded dice, a world where everything worked against her.

Hope was what drove Hakuno to pick her fallen body off the floor, time and time again, every time she swayed and stumbled trying to win a game she wasn’t meant to win—but she did, anyway.

Hope was what made her strong- and that hope, which had once burnt brightly inside her body like an undying flame, had been Hakuno's fatal flaw, too.

Ereshkigal knows, from her own suspicions and from her vessel’s future memories, that Gilgamesh won’t get to enjoy the charming delusion most other parents can indulge in; that his son will live long and thrive.

Taking his place, his son has become her sister’s scapegoat, and he is already starting to be buffeted by the waves of a moonlight curse that will, soon in time, open like a terrible flower, bursting into full bloom and ready to sing destruction to the world. Plucked from the rivulets of time as well, Nanna’s wrath shall spread, and he’ll have no one to save him from feeling his mind collapse under the weight of a thousand echoing voices from the lonely, deepest depths of Ereshkigal’s abandoned hell, his identity obliterated until nothing is left of it and he drowns, and drowns, and drowns in seawater.

She also supposes that it’s a good thing, that Hakuno was returned to her eternity of nothingness before anything of this could happen with her around—if the two of them had resonated together, she and Ur-Nungal, it would have been devastating. 

…But in their future, if something is left of it before everything they know and cherish meets a tangled end, she is sure they will be meeting again once more—a desolate girl with only her family name as both her last memento and proof of worth, and a girl with no history and effects of worth safe for her own heart, all-giving and thus ever-desolate as well.

Hakuno Kishinami, of no family to call her own anymore because it was surrendered to memory and the passage of time, and Rin Tohsaka, sole bearer of a family name long since lost to the tides of decadence and oblivion. Together, they shall vanquish their equal hollowness.

She -Ereshkigal, Rin, perhaps the both of them, she doesn’t know anymore and maybe it doesn’t even matter because their existences are blending in together until it’s near impossible telling one from the other apart- loves the girl whose name will come to be Hakuno Kishinami, and she thinks that maybe that’s all she needs to know for now, until they can meet again.

Hell is lonely, and it's also repetition. The end wasn’t connected to itself, but to the beginning; just like a circle, the world keeps giving birth to life to that which dies, in a never-ending cycle.

They would just start anew.

Once more, they would start it, and she won’t be alone; she can rest assured that wherever Rin goes to find her, Ur-Nungal will also go chase after her, clingy, problematic piece of shit that he is, but it’s fine, the goddess thinks, because she almost forgot what it was like to connect to someone _like this_ , and she won’t lose it again.

Though dormant inside of the girl who will make herself known as Rin Tohsaka, she will walk alongside the two again, until the far ends of a distant world, the peaceful, melancholic melody of the underworld echoing in her ears as she dances a eulogy beneath her bare feet.

 _Please_ , she begs as she tries to search in Ur-Nungal’s soft brown eyes some kind of solace, a memento from the woman who brought him to her, _just let me dream_.

**Author's Note:**

> Okay, so on a happier note (?) to kind of compensate for this emotional trainwreck, I'm 110% certain that Gil's son would be very much familiarized with the baffling might of La Chancla™: like I'm very sure he and CasGil are the bottom half of [this shitpost](https://twitter.com/PlanetaTamara/status/1371075951371685890?s=20)


End file.
